Remember that final scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” when the rediscovered relic was wheeled into a crowded warehouse never to be seen again?

The moment came to mind last summer — and again this week — with this realization: Charles Lindbergh’s hold on San Diego is slipping away.

On June 19, you might recall, the two dozen aluminum panels forming a high-profile mural of the famed aviator were removed from the exterior wall of the San Diego International Airport’s commuter terminal, wrapped in plastic and hauled to Los Angeles for “condition analysis.” The mural, titled “Lucky/Spirit,” shows Lindbergh holding a model of his famous airplane.

“If there is an opportunity to find a place for it here, we will be looking for it,” the airport’s arts program manager told me that day.

My feeling then? Fat chance.

Now, eight months into their holding pattern, airport officials are ready to spend $25,000 to solicit large-scale mural designs to replace “Lucky/Spirit,” made by artists John and Jeanne Whalen in 1997.

Luckily for those who like the mural, the Whalens are working to preserve it. And if that fails, they want the chance for John to re-create it in the same spot.

The decision, like the mural, is out of his hands.

“They could give it to Big O Tires if they wanted to,” he said. “If they want to destroy it, they have to ask me. Other than that, I don’t think I have any say so whatsoever on it.”

In September, Los Angeles-based art conservator Andrea Morse estimated that restoring and remounting “Lucky/Spirit” would cost $175,000. Her estimate was on the low end of the $150,000 to $300,000 range that airport officials projected before removing the mural in June.

Complicating any restoration is the need to repaint each panel and the possible — but unconfirmed — presence of mold on many of the panels.

Whalen isn’t convinced that numerous “black accretions” on the panels’ backs are mold, and he wants the airport officials to analyze them.

He estimates that he can re-create the mural for $91,400, and that the new art would last for decades. He’s just not sure the airport’s leaders are interested. Whalen said airport officials “kind of looked at me funny” when asked if he could submit the same design as part of their new call for ideas.

“I would normally let this kind of thing go,” Whalen told me. “But if I don’t go after this thing or say something or try to make something of it ... it just seemed like almost a travesty.”

Why? Because of the big community response my June column on the mural’s mothballing had generated.

Most readers said it was a shame, although some complained that Lindbergh, who was denounced as an anti-Semite when he was alive, shouldn’t be memorialized at all. Ninety percent of the 704 voters who took part in an unscientific U-T San Diego online poll wanted the mural to go back up.

“No matter what you think of Lindbergh’s politics, you can’t question his achievement in a plane built right here,” one reader wrote last year.